Microsoft Live Labs’ beta Pivot software lets you slice, dice, analyze and examine data, including geographic data, with a unique, animated visual interface. You can’t currently use your own data, but several sample datasets have geographic attributes, including:

National Parks

World Leaders

Endangered Species

Sports Figures

Kiva Loans

Here’s a screenshot of Kiva loans grouped by alphabetical country groups:

Clicking on a group brings up individual data for those countries:

Which can then be filtered by attributes like activity, sector, amount donated, amount needed, or gender (female here):

Double-click on a picture, and it brings up additional information; in this case, the Kiva web page for an entrepreneur inside the program’s own browser:

Here’s a video from TED on the program:

And a video demo from Download Squad demonstrating the program with Endangered Species data:

Windows Vista/7 only (requires Aero, which XP doesn’t have); also requires Internet Explorer (sorry). As I said, you can’t currently use your own datasets, but I have to believe that will be coming soon.

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